Meet Our Vendor: Sushi You Can Hug

Meet Our Vendor: Sushi You Can Hug

We love sushi. We love sushi even more when you can hug it. So look no further, this sweet small business, Sushi You Can Hug, out of Tacoma, WA will allow you to hug all the sushi you want without feeling weird or messy about it.

Who are you and what do you do?

My name is Aleeza, and I run a small business called Sushi You Can Hug. I am an artist from Tacoma who creates and design toys, artwork, and accessories inspired by my love of cute food and pop culture. I think the mashup of ideas that our products are inspired by is what people like most about them. Crossing food with animals or pop culture with parody ends up appealing in multiple ways to people. My favorite part of my doing this is seeing the reactions on peoples faces when the see our booth. There are a lot of smiles, squeals and squeees!

What’s the latest thing you’ve been working on?

We have been making a lot of new plush like the pugnana (pug banana), pug-icorns, baby burritos, purr-awns ( a combination of a kitten and shrimp that resembles a tempura prawn) and fat baby birds. We have also been creating outfits for our existing loaf items so you can dress up your pug loaf plush as dinosaur now!

Any new exciting news you’d like to share with our readers?

We were just featured on King 5 Evening Magazine, you can find the interviewhere.

What was your first memory of making something?

I can remember making a Santa Claus costume out of construction paper and cotton balls. I have been crafting as long as I can remember though, it’s all kind of a colorful blur of paper, felt, and glue.

I know since a young age, I have imagined faces on everyday objects and that helped inspire me creatively. Cute food like sushi rolls, had a lot of personality to me and sparked a bunch of graphic designs. I featured my cute happy food art on buttons and shirts back when I first started my business. I realized people really loved the designs, so I started to sew plush based on my art after that.

What is your favorite new product for 2017?

I really love the Pugnana plush. It was inspired by my pug Jasper’s favorite fruit, the banana. I imagined he was eating a giant banana, and when he was all done, he would crawl inside of the empty peel and take a nap.

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